February 25, 2015 Video & Multimedia You Talk Your Book By Dan Piepenbring Looking rather Führer-ish, Anthony Burgess appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, where he was in rare form throughout—charming, funny, instructive, gently eccentric. The conversation ranges from England as a kind of bland utopia to Shakespeare’s “showbiz” skills and possible venereal disease, the perils of teaching writing (“The kids who want to write are usually very young, and their desire to write is usually a symptom of pubescence”), the insincerity of Milton’s Lycidas, and the distinction between pubs and bars: A bar is not a pub. There are one or two pubs I think in New York … a real pub is a place where all the social barriers come down. You can drink with a member of the aristocracy or the local dustman. You play darts, you drink, you talk, and by this means you generate an atmosphere of genuine democratic society. You get ideas, you hear stories, you talk. And this is useful for a writer. The only pubs you must not, if you’re a writer, go to are the pubs in Dublin. Because in Dublin you talk your book. You say, I’m writing a darling book. Ah, tell us about it, they say. Then you tell them about it. And by the time you tell them about it, you’ve spent the desire to write it … The book is finished. You close it. That Shakespeare book he mentions early on, by the way, received one of the most comically underdone blurbs I’ve ever seen, from Country Life, a magazine for which Burgess himself often contributed. “Of all the books about Shakespeare that 1964 will bring forth,” they wrote, “none is likely to make livelier reading than Anthony Burgess’s historical novel, Nothing Like the Sun.” There are small daggers in that “1964,” that “is likely to”: the most damning of faint praise. Dan Piepenbring is the Web editor of The Paris Review.
February 25, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Best Medicine By Sadie Stein “He just simply couldn‘t stop it / He never knew when it was coming”: Winsor McCay‘s Little Sammy Sneeze, 1905. If you’re not sick, you soon will be, and all the hand sanitizer in the world won’t save you. Everyone is a potential foe; no one wants to admit it. This morning on the subway, everyone was coughing and sneezing with varying degrees of discretion. The only people who seemed at all comfortable were two Japanese tourists wearing paper surgical masks. Well, maybe also the old man with a roll of toilet paper hanging around his neck on a loop of string. I envied all of them. All you can do is read Mark Twain. He wrote “How to Cure a Cold” for the Golden Era shortly after arriving in San Francisco in September 1863. Twain may never have actually said the famous thing about a San Francisco summer being the coldest winter he’d ever known, but the Bay Area fog was presumably enough to aggravate a lingering head cold—well, that or a nineteenth-century cross-country train ride. According to a series of humorous letters to the editor Twain sent in to the Call and the Enterprise around this period, he’d had the cold—and an ensuing bout of bronchitis—for at least a month when he wrote this piece chronicling various home remedies. Read More
February 25, 2015 Look The Suffering of Books By Dan Piepenbring Alexis Arnold, San Francisco Phone Book, 2013. For centuries, books have enjoyed the benefits conferred on inanimate objects, chief among which is their immunity to pain. So lucky they are, so smug, sitting painlessly on their shelves, passing the time. But it is winter, and it is cold, and now our books must freeze as their readers do. To that end, Colossal has introduced me to the work of Alexis Arnold, who, in her Crystallized Book series, dips found books in a borax solution (is this proprietary? Can I buy some?) that freezes, crystallizes, destroys, or preserves them—whichever verb suits your fancy. Arnold aims to return books to a kind of prelapsarian state as aesthetic, functionless objects, unburdened by the complications of text. Her frozen books, she writes, are “artifacts or geologic specimens imbued with the history of time, use, and nostalgia. The series was prompted by repeatedly finding boxes of discarded books, by the onset of e-books, and by the shuttering of bookstores.” See more below, and here. Read More
February 25, 2015 On the Shelf Peacock-eating for Poetical Public Relations, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A mural in Switzerland. Photo: Roland zh In a 1914 publicity stunt—back when poets were free to partake of the great PR machine—Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and four others gathered at a luncheon to eat a peacock. “The papers were alerted, and news of the meal spread far and wide, from the London Times to the Boston Evening Transcript.” Karl Ove Knausgaard, your humble correspondent, is traveling across America for The New York Times Magazine: “The editor proposed that I travel to Newfoundland and visit the place where the Vikings had settled, then rent a car and drive south, into the U.S. and westward to Minnesota, where a large majority of Norwegian-American immigrants had settled, and then write about it. ‘A tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville,’ as he put it.” Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Wagner: the Romantic legacy of these composers lives on … in first-person shooters. “The grandiloquent sounds of the nineteenth century are still alive in the new millennium … but only when someone is getting bludgeoned, bloodied, blown-up, or decimated with automatic weapons … Even heavy metal isn’t heavy enough for most composers seeking to juice up their combat scenes. We need something with a little more sturm und drang. Starting to write a book is hard. Then there’s the whole middle part—also difficult. And finally there’s the end, which is no cakewalk, either. Can we learn anything from the last sentences in famous novels? “For writers, the last sentences aren’t about reader responsibility at all—it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to stop worrying about what comes next, because nothing does. No more keeping the reader interested, no more wariness over giving the game away. This is the game.” On rereading Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth, a 1982 memoir of her turbulent marriage to John Berryman: “For a long time I could not shake the belief that these poets, all of them dead before their time from madness, self-neglect or suicide, paid a noble price for their pursuit of truth and beauty … I don’t think that anymore. Now, it’s Simpson herself who seems to be the hero … Simpson, who became a psychotherapist and went on to publish several books, writes with an almost uncanny clemency and a kind of cerulean objectivity. Where there might have been bitterness there is, instead, compassion.”
February 24, 2015 Bulletin John Jeremiah Sullivan Wins Windham Campbell Prize By Dan Piepenbring © Harry Taylor Many congratulations to our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, for winning one of this year’s Windham Campbell Prizes. The citation calls him “an essayist of astonishing range … empathetic and bracingly intelligent.” We heartily agree. If you haven’t heard of the Windham Campbell Prizes, that’s because this is only the third year they’ve been awarded— Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell founded the prize in 2013 “to call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.” Awards are given for fiction, nonfiction, and drama, to those who write in English anywhere in the world. “I couldn’t overstate how encouraging this award is,” Sullivan wrote, “or how practically helpful. In this phase of my writing life I feel a desperate need to stay down over the research I’m doing, not look up, and the prize makes that possible.” Also among this year’s nine winners is Geoff Dyer, whose work has previously appeared in The Paris Review. We applaud him, too, along with all of this year’s prizewinners. In September, they’ll gather at Yale for a festival celebrating their work.
February 24, 2015 Look Alice Neel’s Brothers Karamazov By Dan Piepenbring Alice Neel, Untitled (Karamazov, His Three Sons, and the Servant Gregory), ca. 1938, 14 ¼” x 10”. © The Estate of Alice Neel. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London. Alice Neel, who died in 1984, is remembered best as a portraitist—her paintings present friends, lovers, and other intimates with an astonishing, often forbidding guilelessness. Your average Neel portrait is penetrating, flip, scary, and more than a little funny, depending on how long you’re willing to hold its subject’s gaze. Neel’s people all look to be plodding through the Stations of the Cross with a kind of decadent resignation—this is the world we live in, and oh well. “Alice loved a wretch,” her daughter-in-law told the Guardian in 2004. “She loved the wretch in the hero and the hero in the wretch. She saw that in all of us, I think.” When Neel wasn’t painting, she was sketching. Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors, a new book with a corresponding exhibition, collects this interstitial work, some of it polished and some hauntingly restive. “There is an essential melancholy to Neel’s work,” Jeremy Lewison writes in the book’s opening essay. “She presents a world of hardship, of tenement buildings and shared bathing facilities, of underprivileged and underclass immigrants, of humanity weighed down by the burdens of living in the harsh metropolitan environment, of human loss and tragedy.” All of which makes her a natural candidate to reckon with the Russian classics, those icons of gloom. Read More